My visual artwork of late has been rather intensely focused on the lives of the saints, both those canonized by some official church body and also those who haven’t made any official list but whose lives deeply speak to not just holiness in general, but the particular path to which I understand myself to be called. At the same time, I've been trying to make sense in my life of why does it feel like I have crushes on twenty gazillion people when I'm not even sure whether I experience romantic attraction? Saints and fan crushes. You’d think they’re totally separate things. And yet…
And it hit me. I get this warm fuzzy euphoric feeling at the thought of being around certain people because something in their way of being gives me hope that it’s possible to be the kind of person I want to be in the world. I see in some aspect of their lives of way of being a suggestion of the me I long to be. The euphoria comes from the sense that if I can be around them, maybe I can emulate not all of them, because they, as a whole, are a different person than my authentic self, but the aspects of the authentic me that I see modeled in them.
What do I want to be when I grow up? Who do I want to be when I grow up? Finding traces of my authentic self in others gives me joy in the hope that it might become slightly easier to make my way through the world because their example is like King Wenceslaus’s footsteps through the snow.
It all clicked. Celebrities and artists and authors that I wished could be my friends and neighbors, relatives and family friends that I really looked forward to seeing at the holidays, historic figures I wished I could meet, teachers I found especially inspiring, and people I meet that I feel like I have some sort of crush on despite not even quite knowing what to do with the concept of romance… it’s the same warm fuzzy glow I get from being around all of them. And it’s a joy of being in the presence of something I want to emulate, not to become a copy of them (indeed, everyone is broken in their own way, and the brokenness isn’t what I want to copy; I have plenty of my own), but because some aspect of them models the me that I long to be. And seeing that the way of being I long to instantiate can be real produces an authentic joy, which only intensifies when I can be in a presence that helps me grow into it.
Now there are plenty of people I admire but don’t see in them a path to grow into who I long to be. There are people whose company I enjoy because they’re awesome, but I don’t get that glow because their awesomeness is great but I don’t see in it a model of the particular form of awesomeness I feel drawn to live out. I don’t get that warm fuzzy glow from people who are awesome but their awesomeness doesn’t show me a path to live out the authentic me I long to live out. I deeply appreciate them, but they’re not who I’m talking about here.
The people that make me glow – living celebrities like Stephen Colbert or others, some of whom I'm astonishingly actually Facebook friends with – or people who have left this world like Dorothy Day or Thomas Merton or Daniel Berrigan or Martin Luther King Jr.– or people in my “real” life that I get this warm glow when I get the chance to be around them – or the people I only encounter on social media and then wish I could spend time with in daily life – what they have in common is that something about the way that each of them are them in the world gives me hope that I can grow into the me that I most deeply aspire to be, and I want to be around them because I long for some of their them-ness to rub off on me, not so I can copy them (one of them is enough), but so I can grow into the me that I so deeply long to grow into.
I’m looking for the footsteps through the snow that happen to fall along my path to help me make my way through the drifts. And I’m writing this and sharing it in case it might leave any helpful steps for others on their unique journeys, because just like other people leave footsteps as they make their way through the world, so do I, and maybe my footsteps could fall for a few steps along someone else’s path, and they could benefit from the snow I’ve managed to pack down.
Praise God for those in every generation in whom Christ has been honored. Pray that we may have grace to glorify Christ in our own day.
